[conspire] request verification of plans to partition and format external hard drive

[Darlene Wallach]

I have a 160G external firewire hard drive.
Thanks to Daniel I have the pci card. I found a power
supply that seems to be working. I want to partition
and format the hard drive so I can move my data off
my internal drive which currently has Fedora Core 3.
I plan on installing Fedora 7.

# fdisk -l

[snip]
Disk /dev/sda: 163.9 GB, 163928604672 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19929 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk /dev/sda doesn't contain a valid partition table

My questions:
1. Should I make 2 partitions?
    - one for data - all the rest for data
    - one for swap - how much swap?
2. Can I make one big data partition?
3. Does it matter which I partition first? I was
    planning on putting data on 1st with swap at
    the end.
4. Since I may use this external drive for data, I plan
    on using ext3. Is that a good plan?
5. Should I use the "s" option in fdisk to create a new
    empty Sun disklabel vs "n" for add a new partition?

Are there questions I'm not asking that I need to
consider?

Thank you for any/all feedback.

feeling very foolish asking these questions,

Darlene Wallach